As any partisan city dweller will tell you, Libertyville is no Lincoln Park, and Milwaukee Avenue is no Division Street.
But in the evolution of the last few years, such a fine fandango of new bars and restaurants has turned up on Milwaukee Avenue, from Libertyville to Lincolnshire, that it has turned into Lake County’s hottest strip for entertainment and hangouts.
“It is kind of happening around here,” says Lincolnshire Marriott box office employee Brett Ehlman, 26, who actually lives in Mt. Prospect. He speaks as if he can’t quite believe it.
So what if “bar crawling” itself is still rather a misnomer in these parts, given the amount of open fields and green space between towns? In fact, things are so spread out that if you want to bar-hop around here, you might as well bring a sport utility vehicle as well as a designated driver.
But no matter. It looks as if, on the Lake County landscape, Milwaukee Avenue has arrived.
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First stop on the north end of the Milwaukee Avenue tour is the Buffalo Bar & Grill, a country roadhouse type of place that serves buffalo burgers and steaks and has three different bar areas with karaoke, country line dancing and a dance bar on Friday and Saturday nights. The restaurant also has banquet hall facilities next door.
Owner Sandy Sun of Waukegan had never even been in a bar before she invested in the Buffalo in 1988. “And I don’t even drink,” giggles Sun, a native of Korea.
Gradually, however, she moved from silent partner in what was then a German specialty restaurant to general manager, changing the name, adding the all-American menu (including the buffalo burgers), even hand-painting the walls herself with American icons such as James Dean and Elvis Presley.
It’s clear–as she moves through the crowd, greeting customers and sharing a bite of someone’s birthday cake–Sun has created a homey atmosphere, with a lot of regulars.
The easygoing camaraderie is what differentiates this bar from its big-city counterparts, according to some.
“This is not like the city. This is friendlier,” Sun says emphatically.
“It’s like `Cheers.’ Everybody knows your name,” says Megan Kownick, 29, a loan officer from Buffalo Grove. “I have no problem coming here by myself.”
She is sitting with a chum from her high school days, Heike Falk, 29, a Wheeling schoolteacher, and Julie Grant of Gurnee, who is the ice skating director at the Highland Park Park District. Kownick and Falk actually met Grant at the Buffalo.
“In Chicago bars, you can’t find a place to sit, it’s crowded,” Grant says, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “We did that when were younger. We’ve grown out of it.”
Heading south, just beyond the Buffalo Bar & Grill, is the David Adler Cultural Center, one of two Milwaukee Avenue cultural hot spots. Along with Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre, these two venues have long positioned themselves as a backyard alternative to a time-intensive and expensive night out in downtown Chicago.
“It’s so painful to drive downtown,” quips Mary Scott, general manager of the Marriott resort complex, just off Milwaukee Avenue in Lincolnshire. “Coming here to a show is much easier.”
The theater has been around since 1979, when executive producer Kary Walker signed on with the agreement that she had to make the theater work or Marriott would turn it into a swimming pool. Walker and her cohorts have been successful; the theater now has a 3,500-subscriber base and an 85 percent capacity rate during peak season.
The David Adler Cultural Center is also doing a booming business these days. Its children’s music classes have a waiting list, and blues, bluegrass and Celtic concerts routinely sell out.
“Anytime we advertise on the marquee out front, we get an increased number of calls. In that way we’re seeing the benefit of the increased traffic on Milwaukee Avenue,” says Dianna Monie, the center’s executive director.
Founded in 1980, the David Adler Cultural Center is the former home of the architect David Adler, whose sister donated the home and its surrounding grounds to the city of Libertyville after he died in 1949. The center gives art, folk and classical music and gardening instruction as well as sponsoring art exhibits, concerts and other cultural events.
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Down Milwaukee from the Adler, in downtown Libertyville, is Mickey Finn’s Brewery, which was a neighborhood hangout dating from Prohibition until 1994, when restaurateurs Pat Elmquest and Bill Sugars expanded the place and turned it into Lake County’s first microbrewery.
Mickey Finn’s has a two-story dining area from which to view the brewing process, plus a bar and patio, where this night sits Mundelein elementary school teachers Liz Golden, 39, of Northbrook and Beth Kilroy, 33, of Oakwood Hills, along with Beth’s husband Dan, 32, a financial analyst. They are talking about recent vacations and sampling the pub fare and beer, which they declare better than Chicago’s Goose Island ale.
“It’s low-key and subtle, very good,” Golden says of the place. The relaxed patio also gets top marks. “It’s very comfortable,” says Dan Kilroy. “There’s not a lot of pretension here.”
But weekend nights, there’s not a lot of room either. The place is consistently jammed.
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Proceeding down Milwaukee Avenue, through Vernon Hills and past a dandy pool palace, Slate Street Billiards, we come to the Half Day Inn, long a Lake County hangout, and its new competition, Flatlander’s Restaurant & Brewery, a microbrewery that has a restaurant with Midwestern specialties such as venison, pheasant breast, buffalo steaks and walleye in addition to regular pub fare, steaks and chops.
Inside, it’s obvious that Flatlander’s Brewing Co. Inc.–the three founding partners are John Jacobs, 35, of Oakwood, Lance Bell, 27, Palatine, and Rick Westervelt, 37, of Chicago–has spent $3.7 million on decor alone. Studded with Prairie School-style furniture and lamps, the high-ceilinged dining room has an open-ended fireplace, and the large adjoining bar provides a big video screen and stage for entertainment.
Although some of the less adventuresome locals have groused that Flatlander’s, unlike Mickey Finn’s up the street, serves only its own beer and doesn’t sell imports or domestic beer, Flatlander’s beer menu provides an array of choices from fruit ale reminiscent of cherries to a thick, chocolaty stout to a more mainstream Harvest Amber Ale. As with Mickey Finn’s, its tall metal brewery tanks provide a focal point of interest along the far wall of the bar.
Outside in the beer garden, the microbrewery’s master brewer, Chicago resident Mark Duchow, 30, head bartender Dan Temesy, 29, and assorted pals relax with a pint of Flatlander’s stout–off the clock, of course.
Bartender Temesy, who has worked in the area for a dozen or so years, believes the advent of new microbreweries and restaurants along Milwaukee Avenue is a long time coming.
“It’s long overdue,” he says. “First came the houses, then the stores, and now the bars and restaurants. When I first starting working up here, there was nothing but cornfield.”
Most people who study these kinds of things for a living agree with Temesy’s from-the-hip assessment, including Dan Timm, executive director of MainStreet Libertyville, a not-for-profit economic development and historical preservation group that works to develop downtown Libertyville.
“It’s a high-traffic area,” Timm says of Milwaukee Avenue. “There has been a lot of residential growth out here that’s just part of the deal.” Timm says his group estimates, according to Illinois Department of Transportation traffic studies, that 30,000 cars migrate up and down Milwaukee on a given day, just in downtown Libertyville.
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The last stop on the Milwaukee Avenue tour takes us almost to the outskirts of Deerfield. Along the way, from Libertyville through Lincolnshire are excellent restaurants too numerous to mention and bound to become hangouts in their own right. But here, at this last stop sits a longtime entertainment venue apparently on its way out: Shades, a club that caters to well-known rock bands and better local bands. It’s closed tonight for a private party. Shades’ lease expires at the end of the year, and about 400 feet south of where Shades now stands, an Addison development company will build a $30 million hotel, movie and restaurant complex, with a Hampton Inn and Suites hotel and four themed restaurants to be named later. In other words, things are going to get even hotter for Milwaukee Avenue.
Scott Greenberg, vice president of the Environmental Community Development Co. of Addison, reports that the development firm hopes to break ground on the project in October. The development’s 18- to 20-screen multiplex theater, Greenberg says, “will really act as a catalyst for the area.”
Across the street, Ernie Vole, a 72-year-old Vernon Hills wrecking service and garage magnate, built Julie’s Country Club Saloon, a cavernous, three-story country dance hall and restaurant, as a monument to his wife, Julie, who died four years ago. It opened in November 1995.
“I needed a place to hang out,” Vole jokes, sitting down for an interview late this night at Julie’s. “I’m kind of a country gentleman, . . . a hillbilly.”
Nearby, on the huge dance floor, country music aficionados swing their cowboy boots and line dance to country music blaring at full volume. Despite the powerful big-time dance mix, Lake County’s rural flavor still pervades, from the rustic exposed beams on the inside and the fact that outside, when Vole opens up a door to let in some fresh air, one can see the neighboring farmer’s Morgan horse, Thunder, grazing quietly in a field with her tiny new foal, Storm.
Storm, oblivious to the growing busy-ness of Milwaukee Avenue, is sleeping in clover.
But for how long?
